According to reports, the FBI has questioned former Trump White House attorney Pat Cipollone and his assistant Patrick Philbin about the papers that were found last week during a search of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home.
The attorneys were asked how boxes of White House papers ended up being kept at the Palm Beach, Florida, resort after Donald Trump’s presidency, according to a report in The New York Times published on Tuesday.
When it learned of the lost data, the National Archives apparently contacted Philbin, but Trump rejected its attempts to recover the records, some of which were purportedly designated as classified.
The Hill contacted Philbin and Cipollone for comment, but neither responded right away.
The former president apparently stated that the documents were “my, not theirs.”
In January, fifteen cartons of data—among them “paper records that had been torn up by former President Trump”—were returned to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
Trump’s continued ownership of the records beyond his term in office, according to NARA, is a violation of the Presidential Records Act, which mandates their preservation and transfer to the National Archives.
The National Archives had directed the problem to the Justice Department, which is said to have filed a subpoena in May for records they thought were still at Mar-a-Lago.
The Times said that although a Trump lawyer acknowledged in writing that classified data had been given over, authorities had grounds to suspect more papers were still kept at the home.
Last Monday, the FBI carried out a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago; Trump has criticized this action as being politically motivated.
The Justice Department requested a judge to unseal the search warrant after inquiries about the reason for the search, but the agency has resisted doing so because doing so may jeopardize the investigation.
According to other records, the FBI found 11 sets of secret documents at Trump’s home.
The source used in the creation of a news story: https://thehill.com
